Chloe So, co-founder and chief executive of PulpaTronics, has been named a winner in Innovate UK’s 2026 Women in Innovation Awards, handing one of the UK’s more interesting sustainable RFID ventures a grant and a year of structured business support.
The Women in Innovation programme page published by Innovate UK Business Connect lists So among the 2026 winners, alongside Ofeoritse Blessing Allen-Adebayo of Algaenic Ltd, Catherine Prada of Tactone and Dr Pallavi Gore of 5GoreConn. Award winners receive a grant of £75,000 plus 12 months of business support, training, networking and mentoring.
The win sits inside the largest cohort Innovate UK has assembled for the programme. Announced on 5 August, it covers 100 women founders working across advanced manufacturing, digital and technologies, and life sciences. Of those, 61 take the £75,000 grant and the support package, while 39 highly commended applicants receive the support package without the grant. The stated themes are healthcare improvements, strengthening supply chains, the net zero transition and global competitiveness, and the other innovations picked out range from wearable dehydration detection and carbon negative foam alternatives to AI accelerated MRI scanning that cuts scan times by 90% and precision RNA therapeutics for Parkinson’s disease.
What PulpaTronics is building
PulpaTronics, an Imperial College London spinout, is working on metal-free RFID tags. Rather than laminating an etched or printed metal antenna onto a substrate, the company laser induces conductive circuitry directly onto the substrate itself, which removes the metal antenna from the bill of materials. The design is also chipless, so there is no silicon IC to attach. Fewer components and a single lasering process cut the number of manufacturing steps, and the company says the resulting tags are fully compatible with existing paper recycling systems.
That last point is a commercial argument as much as an environmental one. PulpaTronics cites a figure of roughly 45 billion RFID tags manufactured each year for single use, most of which are pulled off the product by the consumer and end up in landfill. Retail labelling volumes are the obvious pressure point, and the company estimates that one million items carrying its tags would avoid around 2,000kg of CO2 a year. Its tagline, “Power more. Extract less.”, is aimed squarely at that waste stream.
Chipless RFID has been a long-running research topic rather than a shipping product category, and read range, data capacity and reader compatibility remain the hard problems. Public funding of the kind Innovate UK has just awarded is precisely what tends to move that sort of work out of a university lab and into something a label converter or a retailer can pilot.
A funding track record
Innovate UK has run Women in Innovation since 2016, investing more than £15 million in 260 women innovators and building a community of over 11,000 women business leaders. Previous winners have gone on to secure a further £358 million in external funding, and the success rate for women-led applications across Innovate UK competitions has risen from one in seven to one in three. This year’s cohort includes 29% from ethnic minority backgrounds, 20% with long-term health conditions or disabilities and 50% with caring or parental responsibilities, with representation from every UK nation and region.
Emily Nott, head of inclusive innovation at Innovate UK, said each member of the cohort “is working towards delivering significant economic and social impact for the nation through innovation.”
For PulpaTronics the award adds to a run that already includes the Green Alley Award, a place in Startups 100 2026 and the Manufacturing Futures Innovation Challenge Prize 2026.
Read more at https://www.ukri.org/news/innovate-uk-backs-100-women-shaping-the-uks-future-industries/
